Three Big Data Problems in the Marine Sector and How a Cloud Data Platform Solves Them

Key takeaways

• Problem 1, data silos: High survey costs and huge data volumes keep marine data locked in isolated data lakes and on local servers.
  
• Problem 2, poor data quality: Manual preparation, mixed file formats, and costly specialist software prevent collaboration.
  
• Problem 3, disconnected applications: Format-specific software limits analysis to one or a few data sources, which blocks big data, real-time analytics, and machine learning.
  
• The solution: A central cloud platform that stores, standardizes, and analyzes marine data in one place.
  

The marine industry is facing an unprecedented decade: digital technologies promise progress in the development of offshore wind power and the protection of marine habitats. But the dawn of the data age is failing because of silo thinking and the high cost of marine data. north.io wants to overcome the biggest hurdles for the digitalization of the “blue economy” with its own ocean data platform.

Why does the blue economy need better marine data now?

In the face of species extinction and climate change, the United Nations has declared 2021-2030 the Decade of Oceans for Sustainable Development. Mankind will only achieve its 1.5-degree target by massively expanding offshore wind power and removing CO2 from the atmosphere, for example by cultivating seagrass beds. New technologies such as autonomous offshore drones and robotic ships promise to speed up site exploration and reduce project costs. But urgency and technological progress are coming up against an industry that has had little connectivity. 

For many decades, the traditional players on the high seas kept to themselves: fishing fleets, resource companies, research institutes, navies and shipowners. They have been gathering knowledge about the oceans since time immemorial, but until now, each to his own. Today, no region of the world is less explored. As of 2026, 28.7% of the seafloor has been mapped at all, and even less is sufficiently resolved for economic and scientific applications (Seabed 2030). 

With a data platform in the cloud, north.io is paving the way for the blue industry to enter the data age. The goal: simplify and accelerate the storage, processing, analysis and exchange of data, while noticeably reducing the marginal costs per data set. This is the only way to make modern approaches to robotics, artificial intelligence, and real-time processing economically viable. With its platform, north.io addresses three central problems of big data in marine projects. 

Problem № 1: Why is marine data locked in silos?

The data of marine industries are not connected in the way the oceans are. Owners hoard data assets in isolated data lakes and on local servers. Exchange is done cumbersomely over land, not infrequently still by mailing hard drives!

Primary reasons for these data silos: 

• Cost of collection: Collecting sensor data is expensive. To explore the seabed, wind farm operators send measurement engineers (geo survey) on special ships to the continental shelf. Such an undertaking costs several tens of thousands of euros - per day. Nobody gives away such data.
  
• Volume of data: Even for the basic model of the seabed beneath a wind farm site, 10 terabytes of data are generated (1 terabyte corresponds to 1,024 gigabytes). Much more data is added during a turbine life cycle. To constantly transfer such volumes of data would be time-consuming and expensive, even with fiber optic lines.
  
• Transfer costs: A cloud is excellent as a central storage location. But without specialized applications, the data must be downloaded again from the cloud for processing. Each data transfer costs high fees from the cloud provider and time.
  

The solution: A central cloud for data management

north.io pushes into this gap with its platform. The start-up from Kiel's Science Park has built a central data cloud for the offshore industry. The platform offers industry-specific tools to store, manage and share sensor and metadata with partners. The goal is to break down data silos and make operational data available to all marine project stakeholders on one platform.

Problem №2: How does poor data quality inhibits collaboration and drives costs?

To extract information from sensor data, the context and technical parameters of each measurement must be stored, such as the frequency range for sonar measurements (metadata). Until now, highly paid experts have reviewed and sorted raw and metadata by hand. 

• Metadata: Extracting information from sensor data requires the context and technical parameters of each measurement, such as the frequency range of a sonar measurement. Highly paid experts have so far reviewed and sorted this by hand.
  
• Formats and licenses: Different sensor types produce different file formats, each needing specialized software with additional license fees, usually installed locally or accessed via the vendor's web app.
  
• Compute time: Growing data volumes mean processing times of days or sometimes weeks.
  
• Result: Data is not fit for cooperative use, let alone for selling to third parties.

The solution: prepare data directly in the cloud

The north.io platform creates a unified database by converting all raw data into a universal open-source format. This eliminates the need for expensive specialized software to read the data. So do data transfers to refine the data. Thanks to a uniform output format, processes for quality control and sorting can finally be automated.

Problem №3: Why does disconnected software block innovation?

The last and most important value creation stage extracts information from raw data: through analysis. Because each data format requires its own specialized software, the focus of analysis is necessarily limited to one or a few data sources. The fragmented data management makes the use of modern methods such as Big Data, real-time analyses and machine learning almost impossible. At the same time, innovation and surprising insights are only created by recombining data.

The solution: One platform for data and business applications

In the north.io cloud, customers no longer need to transfer their raw data to local specialized software for analysis. In the future, the platform will deliver all the necessary specialist applications at the same time. Analysis modules can be booked as software as a service, for example, generic statistics modules, visualization filters or interactive maps with geolocations, right through to complex, AI-based processes that are becoming increasingly powerful as the volume and quality of data grows and can also be transferred to other use cases.

The platform will soon be able to integrate third-party analysis methods via a marketplace. A so-called "WorkFlow Engine" enables users to contribute their own algorithms for data analysis and use them in the cloud.

Conclusion

With data platforms like north.io, marine players are not only reducing costs and time spent on internal project workflows. Industry-specific clouds also finally create the basis for data-based cooperation with business partners. Companies gain fast and cost-effective access to the latest software technology without having to buy licenses and operate their own systems for every use. In the long term, north.io's founders plan to expand their platform into a data marketplace, thus creating a basis for data-based business models. In the decade of the oceans, a shared data space could thus give a decisive boost to the digitization of the entire marine economy.

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